Today I went to Auschwitz with Eric and Amelie: A couple new Canadian friends from Montreal that I met last night at the hostel.
My expectation was that it would be a couple buildings on a site somewhere near a town.
Actually, it (there are actually 3 Auschwitz sites) is quite huge with over 400 buildings not including the set of gas chambers, crematoriums and ash pits.
The size of the compounds was the biggest surprise for me. One site was reported to be holding 100,000 people at one location and it looks plausible based on the size of this site.
Other than that, the following had the biggest impacts:
1. The layout maps of the gas chamber which showed the engineering and design that went into doing such evil as efficiently as possible. i.e. the staging areas where the victims would strip their clothes, the gas chamber, the area where they would recover gold fillings etc, the crematoriums and the ash pits formed a bit of a pipeline so that they could process up to 1000 people this way in each of their facilities (4 in parallel at the Birkenaw site.)
2. The Nazi picture which showed the rows of crematoriums that were inside the execution chambers. The chambers have been destroyed somewhat, but the Nazi's kept pictures of the facilities which show vivid details of their facilities.
3. The two ton collection collection of women's hair in the museum. Basically there is a huge 30 foot long by 10 foot high pile of hair behind glass (and preserved with what smells like mothballs) on display. This hair was used to create fabric to support the Reich. There was also a sign which indicated that they have tested the hair and it does contain some level of cyanide which supports the notion that it came from people killed within the gas chambers.
4. The collection of people's shoes. There are three mountains of shoes also on display. Some fancy high heels, some childrens shoes, mostly basic black leather shoes.
Visiting the site was strange because I spent alot of the time trying to figure it out. At the start, actually I was trying to find my own evidence. Later, I was trying to sort out what it meant at the time and what a place like this means today. For example, later in the afternoon, the sun came out and Aushwitz actually looked beautiful.
On display in one of the museaums was the following quote from Adolf Hitler: "I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience, morality... we will train young people whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence, imperious, relentless, cruel."
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3 comments:
I'm feeling despaired and angry today - I think because I opened that door yesterday - so I had not been thinking of current examples but rather the counter-examples of love, compassion and the beauty of nature.
I also wonder about if one can handle or if there is a reason to open yourself to everything. By to open, I mean more than accepting the superficial notion that something happened, but to think and feel the implications of the act, the drive of those in power and the helplessness of the oppressed. It seems natural, sane and possibly correct only to try and counterbalance this despaired view.
Anyway that's the larger picture of what I'm actually thinking. Mostly today has been about uncontrolled images or waves of ideas which start to claw at me until they become pronounced enough that I feel I have to try and abstract or channel them to reduce the number of ideas or try and rationalize - where denial is one form of rationalization - to impede the intensity of the idea.
I guess this is a whole lot of words to try to argue that that denial has it's place to deal with things and that there is also a bright side to things. The things in this case are huge scale crimes, but the same arguments can apply to much more personal things.
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